The Boston Globe article “Why We Give” I wrote about in the previous blog made me curious about Deborah Small at The Wharton School. It turns out she has done quite a bit of research on charity and why people give…or don’t. One of her papers is titled, “The Face of Need: Facial Emotion Expression on Charity Advertisements.” Maybe it’s just me but I found the results fascinating. Did you know:
Pictures showing sad faces are far more capable of producing similar states of sympathetic sadness than pictures of happy faces can create happiness on the part of the viewer. A phenomenon known as “emotion contagion” occurs when people pick up on cues from a picture and it produces the same emotion in the viewer as the person portrayed in the photograph. Sadness has high “emotion contagion” value but happiness does not. In other words it is far easier to “catch” sadness. “Sadness contagion facilitates sympathy because the observer shares the victim’s pain but happiness contagion fails to connect the observer to the victim’s negative state.
Pictures that are accompanied by detail about the person or the situation or the cause are far less effective because “such information about the charity or victim might then engage a more deliberate mind-set overriding the emotional response.” Engaging the intellect diminishes the effect of the emotion. “This is not to say that information cannot induce a sympathy but rather that it dilutes or even overrides the impact of emotional contagion.”
A picture can actually be “too sad” and diminish the emotional effect. “sadness may work only to the extent that people feel that a donation can alleviate the sadness of the child. An intensely sad advertisement might evoke a feeling of helplessness. Furthermore intense sadness is associated with a ruminative cognitive style in which people become self-focused and have trouble relating to others. If an advertisement evokes such a state it might actually reduce giving. Moreover an intense sad expression might appear phony and posed to viewers thus potentially causing reluctance. Therefore it is important to distinguish between the subtle sadness induced by a mild facial emotion expression and more intense sadness which would likely result from a combination of facial expression and other bleak or graphic ad features.”
So…while it may be the season to be jolly just know that jolliness is not catching but sadness – not too much though – is. I’m going to swim upstream on this one.